(1) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a digital video recording apparatus that upon occurrence of a writing error or a power failure, makes video data stored in a recording medium coordinate with management information managing the video data, during the recovery operation.
(2) Description of Related Art
Conventional VCRs record video data continuously on tape. In this recording method, the recording order of video data on tape is used as the playback order as it is, and any special information is not required for management of the playback order of the recorded video data.
VCRs in recent years, however, record management information such as marks like VISS together with video data so that the starts of recorded sequences can be located.
With the above construction, if a writing error or a power failure occurs during recording of video data, both the video data and the management information are recorded onto the video tape up to the point of the occurrence of such a failure. That is to say, such VCRs do not require any special recovery process if a writing error or a power failure occurs during recording of video data.
In contrast, DVD (Digital Versatile Disk) recorders or HDD (Hard Disk Drive) recorders (hereinafter generically referred to as digital video recording apparatuses) record sequences of video data in discontinuous areas on recording mediums. This method requires, therefore, management information used for managing addresses of the recorded sequences of video data on recording mediums.
For the above reason, the digital video recording apparatuses update the management information each time they record a certain amount of video data onto a recording medium.
However, if a writing error or a power failure occurs during recording of video data, a mismatch occurs between a file storing the recorded video data (hereinafter referred to as stream file) and the management information. Also, in such a case, a stream file may be successfully recorded onto a recording medium, but the video data in the stream file may not be managed by the management information. In this case, the video data is not played back.
One method of solving the above problem is to write the management information onto the recording medium with the same timing as the video data so that the stream files always coordinate with the management information. This method, however, has another problem that data should be frequently written onto the recording medium.